New in 5.0.4: the master looter can request rolls

I noticed this feature in a raid last week, but held off on posting about it until I could collect some screenshots. This doesn’t seem to be in the 5.0.4 patch notes and not a lot of people have noticed it – which is a pity, because it’s quite useful! Hence the post.

Say you kill a boss – whether in a PuG or in a guild run – and you have master looter on, because that’s what you do.

If you wanted people to roll for an item before the 5.0.4 patch, you’d have them /roll. This was open to potential cheating and trolling: people could just /roll multiple times until they got a high number or /roll 100-100 and hope the master looter didn’t notice, for instance.

Now, in addition to the usual “Assign Loot” option, you get a new one called “Request Roll”.

It does pretty much what it says on the tin. It pops up a roll window for everybody in the raid, including the master looter himself. The roll window is perfectly normal and has the usual need / greed / pass / disenchant buttons:

The rolls get automatically tallied in the new loot window, which will open if you don’t have it open already. The loot, however, does not get automatically assigned, so you can still make your own decision, discard a roll, discuss before assigning and so on.

This fixes all the issues that were present with manual rolls by removing the ability to spam roll multiple times, with different values, etc, making the feature quite handy for anybody dealing with a master looter plus rolls situation – especially PuGs.

There were – probably still are – addons to deal with the issues, but I always prefer having the functionality in the base game, since that guarantees it won’t break after a major patch. (Yes, bugs do happen, but if Blizzard break the default loot rolls then I’ll really lose all faith in humanity.)